Maternity Clothes are Funny

March 5, 2010

I recently made my first foray to buy an official batch of maternity clothes. Spring is coming, and I can’t continue to camp out under my (and Eric’s) big wool sweaters forever.

I really dislike clothes shopping and tend to buy nearly everything online, but I figured there was no way around it this time. I don’t know how the sizing works – does “large” mean a normal, non-pregnant large woman, or a small woman with a disproportionately huge belly? – and I wanted to try things on to avoid the circus tent effect to the extent possible.

I don’t know who Liz Lange is, but she appears to dominate Target’s entire line of maternity clothes. Liz cranks out all manner of shirts, sweaters, jeans, skirts, and more. They’re relatively cute and cheap – not at all built to last, but nobody buys maternity clothes with an eye to making them the cornerstone of one’s wardrobe for years to come anyway.

There’s a whole lot of smoke and mirrors involved in maternity clothes, I’m learning. There are lots of hidden adjustable belts, and long ties you can get tangled in, and shirts with weird darts to accommodate the growing basketball that’s taken up residence in your belly.

My current staples are two pairs of jeans that look relatively normal until about a foot from the top, at which point they abruptly truncate into a stretchy band of elastic. They look like they have a normal zip fly, but it’s all trompe d’oeil; the fly is just stitched on and you slide the pants on and off like a pair of sweats. They look like they have normal front pockets, but these too are more decorative than functional – they’re cut short by the elastic waist and are barely deep enough to hold a few stray coins.

A larger issue (which beer-bellied men have known about for some time now) is that nothing stays up when you don’t have a waist to hitch things around. I’m seriously considering suspenders, despite knowing full well that I will wind up looking like a TGI Friday’s server, or a rotund version of Mork from Ork.